Thought for Today
Ecclesiastes 1:9 What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.
Isaiah 43:19 I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.
John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
Acts 17:21 Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.
In the movie Victor/Victoria, Julie Andrews sang “Everything Old Is New Again.” Is it? Was the Prophet of Ecclesiastes correct? Is there nothing new under the sun? Did Isaiah misquote God?
Recently, I mentioned Gotfried Leibniz. Some credit him with inventing calculus. Others credit Isaac Newton. If the Prophet was correct, neither Leibniz nor Newton invented calculus. The math was always there; they merely learned how to manipulate the math to solve problems.
As a young boy, I learned the rhyme “in fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” Most credited Columbus with ‘discovering’ America, although the hemisphere was named for Amerigo Vespucci who sailed slightly later. Science now believes that earth’s continents came to their present orientation through the breakup of the supercontinent Pangea about 200 million years ago. The Western Hemisphere, the Americas, was there long before Columbus ‘discovered’ America.
When Columbus and Vespucci did ‘discover’ America, there were already people there. “A new Florida Museum study that determined the age of skeletal remains provides evidence humans reached the Western Hemisphere during the last ice age and lived alongside giant extinct mammals.” (www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu) The article discussing that find was dated 2012 and included “modern humans in North America co-existed with large extinct mammals about 13,000 years ago, including mammoths, mastodons and giant ground sloths.” So, who discovered America?
To the (very limited) extent I understand astrophysics, it is currently postulated that all matter now in existence everywhere in the universe came into being at the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. So, the Prophet was correct, there is nothing new under the sun. Julie Andrews was correct, everything old is new again.
Our ancestors-in-the-faith summed up all that science with “Genesis 1:1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth.” That is the point, that is the ‘time’ when everything began, even time itself. The only thing before Genesis 1:1 was God. To understand how our ancestors-in-the-faith understood the nature of God, I find it instructive to look at the story of Moses. “Exodus 3:13 Moses said to God, "If I come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?" 14 God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM." He said further, "Thus you shall say to the Israelites, 'I AM has sent me to you.'" God is the One who simply Is.
We live in a time of amazing technological progress and development. When I was a young boy, television was in its infancy, land line, rotary dial telephones were just becoming ubiquitous, cell phones and smart phones were only in the newspaper comics or science fiction novels. Electricity is not new. The ancient Egyptians had some concept of electricity and even batteries. All of the basic forces of existence, gravity, magnetism, and electricity were part of the Big Bang. The Electronic Age did not invent any new forces, we have merely learned how to manipulate those forces for our convenience.
As a Christian, however, I know that God has fulfilled those words from Isaiah. God has done a new thing. God stepped into God’s Creation to show God’s creatures the way back to the intimate relationship with God that existed in Eden. God’s love for God’s Creation was manifested in the Incarnation of Jesus, the Christ. God’s love was not new, it was the motive force for the Big Bang, the creative force of Creation. Jesus was a new manifestation of God’s love. New things or merely old things new again, all pale in comparison to God’s love and God’s gift of salvation through faith in Jesus.
Stay safe, thank God today, trust God,
Pastor Ray